'Over Her Dead Body' should be buried immediately

Wednesday

Jan 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMJan 30, 2008 at 6:57 PM

If “Over Her Dead Body” had kept the title that was reportedly it original name — “How I Met My New Boyfriend’s Dead Fiancée or: Ghost Bitch” — it wouldn’t have been any funnier, but at least the title may have made us laugh. As it stands, the title is as forgettable as the film that follows it.

Ed Symkus

If “Over Her Dead Body” had kept the title that was reportedly it original name — “How I Met My New Boyfriend’s Dead Fiancée or: Ghost Bitch” — it wouldn’t have been any funnier, but at least the title may have made us laugh. As it stands, the title is as forgettable as the film that follows it.

If you happen to be a fan of Sergio Mendes & Brazil 66, you’re going to be annoyed from the first frame, as the opening credits are accompanied by a hip-hop mash-up of the infectious “Mais Que Nada,” one of the best Spanish-language pop tunes to come out of the ’60s. What they’ve done to it is heresy!

We’re soon introduced to the woman who, after her early death, would’ve been the Ghost Bitch character. Kate (Eva Longoria) is the kind of person that makes wedding planners want to get out of the business. And on her day of nuptials, she’s a horror to be near, ordering everyone around, determined to make it all perfect. Thank goodness she’s killed in an accident involving a carved ice angel.

A year goes by, and her to-have-been-betrothed, Henry (Paul Rudd), is still shaken, not stirred to start dating, still unaware that he’s the luckiest veterinarian in L.A. for getting out of this marriage. He’s pestered by his well-meaning sister Chloe (Lindsay Sloane) into going to a psychic named Ashley (Lake Bell), purportedly to contact Kate and make sure everything is OK.

Ashley, at first, seems to be in the game just to bilk customers, or at least make them think she’s in contact with the spirit world, telling them only that she has had “some success.” But when nothing works, Chloe secretly slips Kate’s diary to Ashley so she can “know” everything about her and come off as a real psychic. And she agrees to do it!

Wouldn’t you know it, shortly after Henry takes part in a second reading, and Ashley gets a few things about Kate right on the nose, the ghost of Kate shows up, able to be seen only by Ashley (I guess that means that psychics are real), and in a fit of mistaken jealousy, tells her to stay away from Henry.

Or was she mistaken? Are there some hints that something could someday be going on between slightly horny Ashley and lonely Henry?

And what about Ashley’s other career, her day job in catering? What’s with her and her best pal and business assistant, the slightly swishy and blatantly gay Dan (Jason Biggs)? Sorry, you’ll have to wade through the whole film to find out what they’re all about.

This turns into a forced comedy about the psychic waging battle with the ghost for the affections of the unwitting former fiancé and possible future boyfriend. There are some pretty good visual effects that portray Kate’s ghostly powers, but they’re few, as are the story ideas on which to spread out the plotline. And there are a couple of scenes — for instance, one with Chloe and a cat in Henry’s veterinary office — that feel like they’re only there to stretch the film to feature-length. To be fair, a couple of funny sequences do work — one with a ghost-assisted talking parrot comes to mind. One bit that could have been good — the idea that upon Kate’s entrance to the hereafter, she was so jerky, she missed out on her rule-explaining orientation speech — is abandoned early on, then only referenced, but never played out.

Rudd is decent here, especially when he’s allowed to add his naturally dry sense of humor, and Biggs gets to display his propensity for accident-prone slapstick. But Bell is strictly vanilla, and Longoria’s far better on “Desperate Housewives.”

The woman behind me got it right. She had a free ticket to the film, and as she said to her friend as she was leaving, “It was cute, but it wasn’t anything I’d pay to see.”